Due diligence report of Ink Protocol

Disclaimer:

This is not an investment recommendation! ICOindex has done a verification that covers several key aspects that we personally consider to be very important to determine whether the ICO project is legit or a possible fraud. These aspects do not reflect the investment potential or risk. Investing into any initial coin offering (ICO), crowdsale, token sale or any other cryptocurrency presented on this website can result in partial or complete loss of your money. Do not invest in projects you do not understand. Do not invest more than you are willing to lose. ICOindex.com cannot be hold responsible for any issues relating to projects listed on ICOindex.com website.

Executive summary

Ink protocol (XNK) is an interesting blockchain project that aims to disrupt an existing space of peer-to-peer (p2p) marketplaces. The project promises to “enhance the buying/selling process with decentralized reputation and feedback ratings, decentralized escrow for secure payments, third-party dispute resolution, and very low transaction costs.”

Due-diligence report

There are couple reasons makes us positive about the project and its chances to succeed. First of all, the team behind it has a track record of building sustainable businesses. They currently run California-based company Listia, which is an auction marketplace that uses a virtual credit system for bidding and trading goods. The company has received 4 rounds of investments from VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and SV Angel and claim to have over 10 mln users using its platform. Secondly, the plans are exactly to leverage this existing platform as a first consumer of the new blockchain based system. This means investors can expect to see a real adoption of the project sometime soon. On a roadmap from the official project website, Team promises to deliver working version already in Q1 2018.

Being new in a blockchain space, the team aims to close this gap by partnering with experts from Quantstamp and Consensys.

We definitely recommend checking a project whitepaper which is rather a business document outlining use-cases and economy of the token. If you’d like to get more technical details and are familiar with smart-contract technology and Solidity language, take a look at a Github project code and a proof-of-concept code currently running on an Ethereum Rinkeby Testnet.

Pre-sale and ICO (white-listing has started already) is powered by Ethereum network producing own ERC20 compatible token XNK. Here are highlights from our analysis of ICO structure

Update from Jan 20th, 2018

Ink Protocol just announced final details of the pre-sale cap, token price, and the smart contract address on their blog.

In order to enable token distribution for a broader group of investors (make it fairer), pre-sale will be performed in two phases. During first 24 hours investment is limited from min 0.1 ETH to max 1 ETH per whitelisted address. Post 24h it's up to an individual cap. You can get more details on the latest team's blog post.

$15MM maximum sale cap. The hard cap is quite moderate compared to other recent ICOs. Publicly announced hard cap and token allocation allows potential investors to get a hint on potential future fundamentals.

The token vesting period for the project team is 3 years. While it's a shorter period than used for non-blockchain start-ups (typically 4 years), it's longer then lots of blockchain start-ups have (6 months-2 years). Longer vesting period means that team is more incentivized to stay with the project and actively evolve it.

The code of the smart contract that will be used for ICO has not been published yet. While Ink Protocol team claims they are working with Quantstamp on security audit, we were not able to find any public docs that would explain audit methodology and results. It is a good practice to have the code of the contact being published (e.g. on a GitHub) far prior to the ICO itself so a public audit can happen. We contacted the team members via Telegram asking for more information and explanations.

Overall, after the detailed due-diligence investigation, we are glad to grant Ink Protocol (XNK) project a due-diligence certificate for passing ICO Index verification with a result ‘Verified’. For more information about Ink Protocol please visit their profile.